“Don’t say it, little girl.” The man’s smile had broken out at last. “I know. There’ll be no marrying me in the fall. But there will.” He reached out and caught her in his arms. “There will be, my dear, because Max can go clear for me. I’ll not do a thing since you ask it, since you order it. No, little girl, don’t look questions at me, an’ don’t ask ’em. I can see them back of your dandy eyes. I just love you to death, and I want you to feel the game of life as I see it needs to be a straight one. I’m quitting now. I’ve still got things to do. To-morrow I’m going to pick up Len at the coast. He and I’ll have big work for maybe a week. After that I’m through, and I’ll bring him right along to tell you of your Jim. So long, little Claire. I guess that note’ll still stand good. You’ll be safe till I get along back.”
The daylight was passing as McLagan left Claire’s home. He hurried away down the unmade road leading back into the eastern purlieus of the city. He came abreast of the Speedway which had so many turbulent reminders for him. But he passed it by, and thrust from him the leaping anger the sight of it inspired. He crossed over to the Plaza Hotel where he ate a hurried meal. Then, later, he passed again out into the night and his way lay westwards where the moonlight waters of the lake shone still and cold.
CHAPTER XX
The Last of the Moving Shadow
McLAGAN was nursing his team. For once his driving speed was moderated. But then he knew the call he had yet to make upon his ponies. They had already made the journey from Beacon to the coastal harbour, which, one day, in his dreams, he visualized as a flourishing seaport, the rail base of a fresh route to the great interior radiating about Beacon Glory. Miles away to the West lay the port of Seward where the Government railroad, cutting in to the heart of Alaska, began its hopelessly unprofitable career towards Fairbanks. But no thought of such a failure attached to the railroad in his mind. Oil and coal would preclude all possibility of that. Furthermore the vast capital of his Corporation lay behind him. And lack of capital was the thing which had so far made a failure of the Alaskan peninsula which had at one time been known as “Seward’s Folly.”
Now he was leaving the coast behind again, and beside him, on the spring seat of his buckboard, was the bronzed creature he had come in search of. The man’s baggage was enduring the violent joltings of the trail on the rack behind them as the two men talked of the thing which had at last brought them together again.
“It sort of seems like yesterday I was in Beacon,” Len Stern said after awhile, gazing out over the broken hill country through which they were driving. “Say, I mind the landmarks as if I’d never quit. You know, for all it’s a tough proposition it’s my home country in a way. I don’t mean I was born here. No! I’d hate to think that. But—Gee! I was glad quitting Perth. Man, I’ve had heat enough to make a feller need blankets in hell.”
There was a smile in the dark eyes of the man who had journeyed thousands of miles to answer the call which the other had sent out on the sound waves. Perhaps his answer had been the more ready for the fact of those memories stirring now.